Space & Astrophysics
When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn’t know. Here’s how far we’ve come.
Once you cross a black hole’s event horizon, there’s no going back. But inside, could creating a singularity give birth to a new Universe?
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists still take incredible lessons away from Newton’s second law.
No matter what it is that we discover about reality, the fact that reality itself can be understood remains the most amazing fact of all.
With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?
Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we’ll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won’t be the end.
The measured value of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what’s predicted. How can this paradox be resolved?
65 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck Earth. Not only did Jupiter not stop it, but it most likely caused the impact itself.
First ‘Oumuamua, then Borisov, and now ATLAS have shown us that interstellar interlopers are real. Here’s what the newest one teaches us.
Our nearby Ring Nebula, with JWST’s eyes, shows evidence for planet formation. Will the Sun eventually destroy, and then replace, the Earth?
The relic signal that first proved the Big Bang has been known and analyzed for 60 years. Join us at the frontiers of modern cosmology!
The CMB has long been considered the Big Bang’s “smoking gun” evidence. But after what JWST saw, might it come from early galaxies instead?
Once every 12 years, Earth, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all line up, opening a window for a joint mission. Our next chance arrives in 2034.
Over the first half of 2025, the US has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science may be a gift to the rest of the world.
Originally, the abundance of bright, early galaxies shocked astronomers. After 3 years of JWST, we now know what’s really going on.
Looking at a dark, night sky has filled humans with a sense of awe and wonder since prehistoric times. But appearances can be deceiving.
In just its first 10 hours of observations, the Vera Rubin observatory discovered more than 2000 new asteroids. What else will it teach us?
For over 50 years, it’s been the scientifically accepted theory describing the origin of the Universe. It’s time we all learned its truths.
For hundreds of millions of years, a cosmic fog blocked all signs of starlight. At last, JWST found the galaxies that cleared that fog away.
Here in 2025, many of us claim to come to our own conclusions by doing our own research. Here’s why we’re mostly deluding ourselves.
As the closest icy ocean world to
Earth, Ceres may be a promising candidate in the search for signs of ancient life.
Massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063, 4.5 billion light-years away, bends and distorts the space nearby. Here’s what a JWST deep field shows.
Is the Universe’s expansion rate 67 km/s/Mpc, 73 km/s/Mpc, or somewhere in between? The Hubble tension is real and not so easy to resolve.
The ANITA experiment found cosmic rays shooting out of Antarctica. One interpretation claims “parallel Universes,” but is that right?
Different methods of measuring the Universe’s expansion rate yield high-precision, incompatible answers. But is the problem robustly real?
Launched in March, the PUNCH mission has viewed two incredible coronal mass ejections, tracking them farther from the Sun than ever before.
The tiniest galaxies of all are the most severely dominated by dark matter. Could black holes be the cause of the extra gravity instead?
A few physical quantities, in all laboratory experiments, are always conserved: including energy. But for the entire Universe? Not so much.
If you want to understand the Universe, cosmologically, you just can’t do it without the Friedmann equation. With it, the cosmos is yours.
Viewing Uranus’s largest moons with Hubble, astronomers hoped to find darkening on the trailing side. They found the exact opposite instead.